Deeplinks Blog posts about Coders' Rights Project

Last week, we questioned whether Sarah Palin may have violated Facebook's terms of use by using a ghostwriter to update her profile. We also criticized Facebook's attempts to enforce those terms with state and federal computer crime laws — which carry both civil and criminal penalties — in Facebook v. Power Ventures.

As we explained, it's dangerous for a website to claim that users who breach its terms of use also violate computer crime law. Facebook users can easily make uncontroversial choices that nevertheless violate the plain meaning of Facebook's terms. Furthermore, Facebook shouldn't have the discretion to criminalize certain behavior just by forbidding it in terms of use.

Vanity Fair suggests that Sarah Palin's distinctive voice on Facebook and Twitter is actually someone else's. According to the article, she appears to have given a ghostwriter access to her social networking accounts to speak on her behalf:

Hari Prasad, the Indian security researcher arrested for allegedly stealing an electronic voting machine, has been released on bail.

Earlier this year, an anonymous source gave the machine to Prasad and a team of researchers, who discovered critical security flaws. Under questioning by authorities last weekend, Prasad refused to divulge the identity of the source who gave them the machine. He was then arrested and reportedly charged with theft and trespass on the theory that he stole the machine himself.

An Indian computer scientist was arrested this weekend when he refused to disclose an anonymous source who provided an electronic voting machine to a team of security researchers.

Hari Prasad is the managing director of Netindia Ltd., an Indian research and development firm. He and other researchers have long questioned the security of India's paperless electronic voting machines. Despite repeated reports of election irregularities and concerns about fraud, the Election Commission of India insists that the machines are tamper-proof.

In the latest battle to protect users from punishment for violating website terms of use, EFF filed a brief today in U.S. v. Lowson, again arguing that public websites can not decide who is and is not a criminal.

In this federal prosecution in New Jersey, the government charged the operators of Wiseguys Tickets, Inc. with violating Ticketmaster's terms of service, and therefore the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, by using bots to purchase event tickets to resell them.